Surviving The Evacuation (Book 8): Anglesey (11 page)

“Where?” Jones asked.

“The inn,” Lorraine said. “It was about a month ago. I went looking for Darjeeling.”

“Why?” Sholto asked.

“It’s my favourite,” Jones said.

“He was at the bar, him and three others,” Lorraine said.

“Do you remember who?” Jones asked. “Or maybe a name?”

“No,” Lorraine said. “I’d barely stepped inside before I wanted to get out again.”

“Where’s this rear door?” Sholto asked. “I want to know if it’s chained.”

Jones led the way. We went more slowly. I just wanted to get outside, and was sure the others felt the same, but we stopped at each door and checked each room, whether it was locked or not. They were all empty. At the end of that corridor was a wide set of stairs leading up. There were none going down. In the alcove underneath where the stairs bent upwards was a vending machine.

“I wouldn’t mind some chocolate,” Sholto said, shining his torch on the glass doors.

“Bad luck for you, then,” Jones said. “The on-campus machines only had healthy snacks.”

“Just my luck,” Sholto muttered, shifting the light to play up the stairs, then at the corridor beyond. “Maybe that explains the smell. It’s gotten worse. A lot worse.” He stepped closer, shining the light on something almost hidden behind the machine. “Okay. That’s new.”

I peered around him so that I could see. Behind the machine was a pair of feet. They weren’t moving, but I gave them a prod with the pike to be sure. I eased my way around the machine for a better look.

“It’s a man,” I said. “Not a zombie. He wasn’t shot in the head, but he’s dead and decomposing.” I stepped back so Sholto could get a view. He crouched down, getting far closer to the rotting corpse than I’d wanted.

“He’s been stabbed in the side of the neck,” he said. “I’d say this happened at least a month ago. Maybe two. It’s hard to pin a time frame on it, and it’ll be just as hard identifying him. I’d say he was twenty to forty, but I’m not putting money on it. The only distinguishing mark is a tattoo that runs around his neck and up to his ear, starting just above where he was stabbed. It’s a sort of… almost Celtic pattern, but not quite. It’s too blocky.”

“Let me see,” Lorraine said, squeezing past. “Oh.” She backed away again. “Yes. Definitely. I definitely know him. He was with the other guy. Both of them, they were at the inn.”

“Stabbed in the neck?” Jones asked. “Do we call that murder?”

“We can call it homicide,” I said, “but without knowing the circumstances, we can’t say any more.”

“One stabbed, the other infected and locked in a room. Who did it?” Sholto asked, easing out of the narrow alcove. “Are there any cops on the island?”

“No,” Jones said. “Or none who’ll admit it, not after the police’s involvement in murdering the evacuees.”

“Pity,” Sholto said.

“Why?” Lorraine asked. “Someone’s dead. So what?”

“The man was stabbed in the neck, but it wasn’t done behind that machine,” Sholto said, shining his light on the floor. “The body was moved. Why? If you want to hide a murder, just stab the corpse in the brain. No one would question it. Then there’s the wound itself.” He eased back around the machine, shining the torch on the body. “Yeah, it’s hard to be sure, but it looks as if the blade went in about three inches below his ear. One blow, and there was some force to it, so it’s hard to imagine the circumstances where it could have been an accident. And don’t forget that chain on the front door.”

“Markus,” Lorraine said. “I bet it’s him.”

“Maybe,” Jones said. “Maybe not. We’ve no evidence.”

“Fine,” Lorraine said. “Then there’s no reason to linger. When we come back for the equipment downstairs we’ll bring Dr Knight with us, and bring some more lights. We’ll investigate properly, but we’re not going to find anything here now, so let’s get outside, get those sat-phones, and get back.”

“Yeah,” Sholto said. “Get the sat-phones. There was a cop running things in Maine. A homicide detective. This would be right up his street. That body’s been here a while. I think this mystery will wait long enough for us to get a boat there and back.”

The rear door wasn’t padlocked, but it was bolted from the inside. After the discovery of the body, I couldn’t help but think of that as another clue. To what, and what it meant, I didn’t know.

Outside, the soft breeze did little more than move hot air around. It was refreshing after the darkness, and it put the new fears into perspective. A dead body, albeit belonging to someone seen on Anglesey, didn’t mean anything. The wound didn’t mean it was murder. What counted as accidental had surely changed in the last few months. The most likely explanation was that a group had come over to loot the university. They must have split up. One had been infected. Perhaps after locking that person in the lab, another had heard a noise. Expecting the zombie that had infected his friend, he’d spun around, lashing out with the knife, and stabbed his comrade. It was an accident. A stupid, tragic mistake. There was probably even an innocent explanation for the body being moved. Shame and fear could have propelled the killer to do that. I rolled the idea around and found it fit most of the facts. Not all of them, but I felt it was close to the truth.

“Zombie!” Jones hissed. She ducked behind a post-office van stalled a hundred yards from the faculty building. Lorraine took cover behind her. Sholto and I, a few yards behind, hurried to catch up. The zombie was small. Smaller than Annette. I glanced at Lorraine. Her rifle was down, her eyes fixed, almost glazed.

“I’ve got it,” Sholto said, as Jones tried to turn Lorraine away from the pitiful sight. Lorraine wouldn’t move. Sholto fired. The child collapsed.

“It’s gone, Lorraine,” Jones said. “It’s over.”

“It was over a long time ago,” Lorraine said. She took a deep breath. “And it will never be over.” She shook away the memory and stood. “Let’s go.”

The side door to the university’s administrative building wasn’t chained, though it was locked. Sholto had it open in a few seconds, and we went inside. The air felt stuffy, as if it had been trapped in there for months, but there was no odour of decay. It just emphasised that we should have realised what had lain in wait for us in the faculty building.

“They’re in here,” Jones said, pointing at a door marked
Bursar
. It was locked.

“It’s too heavy to pick with these tools,” Sholto said after a moment’s toying with the mechanism. He tapped the door and then leaned his ear against it. “I’d say it’s empty. You want to give it a go?”

I stuck the pike in, splintered the wood, and thought a crowbar would have done the job while making a less cumbersome weapon.

Inside was a simple office with three desks, and another door.

“The phones are in there,” Jones said, pointing at the door.

“This is seriously reinforced,” Sholto said, examining it. “It’s almost like a bank vault. We can’t pick it, or force it. I’ll need to cut it open. Although it might be easier hacking a hole through this wall.” He stabbed his knife into the plaster.

“Or you could use the key,” Jones said. She opened a drawer in the nearest desk, then another. “Here.”

“The keys are in the desk? That doesn’t seem like much of a security precaution,” I said.

“Calling a sister in Australia isn’t a sackable offence,” Jones said. “Taking the key from the drawer and using it enter a secure room is.”

“They were trying to encourage theft?” Sholto asked.

“Only by one truly obstreperous professor,” she said. “The kind who got caught making phone calls to Australia, and then hired a lawyer to find a way to prove he’d done nothing wrong.”

Inside the sealed room were metal filing cabinets.

“Which one is it?” Sholto asked.

“No idea,” Jones said.

“What else is here?” I asked as Sholto went from one to another.

“Exam papers,” Jones said. “And I’m not sure what else.”

I wandered back into the hallway, my mind on the buildings we’d seen, trying to come up with a strategy to salvage everything from the town.

“Bill, you got your bag?” Sholto called.

The phones were bulkier than I’d been expecting, a little deeper and taller than an old dial-pad mobile.

“So what now?” I asked, pressing the power button. Nothing happened.

“They have to be charged, and I’ll need some tablets to use as screens,” Sholto said. “And I’ll need to install some software on those. After that, it’ll just take two or three hours and a clear line of sight.”

“You’ve been carrying around software to hack into a satellite network since the outbreak?” Lorraine asked as we filled the bag.

“No,” he said. “Bill has.”

“I have?”

“It was bundled with the files you downloaded. Didn’t you notice?”

“I didn’t really look,” I said. “Before the power went out, before Prometheus, I was just copying as much as I could. There wasn’t time to look through it all. After the power went out, there was never enough electricity to look at more than a few videos at a go. Then we found you, and since then, I’ve not seen the point.”

“We’re done here?” Jones asked as the last phone was put in the bag. “Then we can go to the pier.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s taken us longer than I thought. We won’t have long to wait for the tide.”

Jones led us away from the finance building and back into the narrow roads. Once again, I was lost and disorientated. I made a mental note to carry a compass from now on, and then remembered that, back in Caernarfon, I’d made a note to visit the firing range.

“Strange, isn’t it?” Sholto said. “Walking through an empty town like this, but knowing safety is a few hundred metres away.”

“Hardly knowing,” Jones said. “The sat-phones, they work on line of sight with a satellite?”

“Yeah, so you can’t use them inside a building unless you hold the transmitter close to a window,” he said.

“We’ve been using ship-to-shore radios,” she said. “The emergency kind, but you’ve got to have line of sight with the receiving antenna. That’s fine when the signal’s going from the top of a boat’s mast to the school, relayed via the antenna on the crane at the docks. That would be utterly useless right now, when I want to tell the rest of my crew where we are.”

“She’s worried Lilith’s going to play the hero,” Lorraine said. The good cheer had returned to her voice. “It’s her favourite game.” She pointed at a battered road sign pointing to a customer car park, and added, “Supermarket.”

“The food’s all gone, surely?” I said.

“It is,” Jones said, “but the freezers aren’t, nor are the chiller cabinets. We’ve so many fish being caught that we could stockpile enough for a year. They’ll wait. Everything can wait, in fact. I want to get to the pier. If we don’t, Lilith will only charge through the town, searching for us.”

“And we’ll end up rescuing her,” Lorraine said. “Again.”

Jones gestured to an alley that I was seventy percent sure led north. On one side was a terraced house with an architecturally out of place window overlooking the alley. Bracketing it on the other side was a detached cottage with a garden wall two feet higher than the terrace’s window. The wall, made of cheap yellow brick, looked as new as the window.

“What was it Robert Frost said about fences and neighbours,” I muttered.

Something metal rattled behind us. I spun around, but the road was empty.

“A can caught in the breeze?” Sholto asked.

“What breeze? Maybe it’s a cat?” Lorraine suggested.

We eyed the apparently empty road behind us, then the narrow alley in front. It widened after twenty feet, but then curved out of sight as it ran behind the houses.

“There’s another way,” Jones said, gesturing eastwards. The mutual good humour we’d shared at being outside and heading towards safety evaporated as we passed a car that had crashed into the front of a knitting shop. The ripe smell of rotting wool was added to that of the dead city. More windows were broken in the houses along the road, making me wonder about the cluster bombs that had fallen on Anglesey, and whether any had struck Bangor as well. We reached a junction and took a left, following the very welcome sign pointing towards the pier.

After fifty curving, erratic yards, we came to a blue-windowed orange-brick building, about a hundred metres long and three storeys high.

“Another university building?” Sholto asked.

“Undergrad accommodation,” Jones said.

“That’s all?” he asked.

“What do you mean, all?”

“Can’t you see the door? There’s a lock on it.”

We crossed the road, getting near enough to the building that I could see the bicycle D-lock running through the door’s handles.

“There’s really nothing but student rooms inside?” Sholto asked.

“Nothing,” Jones said.

“So why lock it?” Lorraine asked, glancing up at the dark windows. “I mean, what’s to loot from a student room?”

“Everything,” I said. “It makes sense when you think about it. A student arrives with their possessions in suitcases. There’re no fridges in the rooms, right? So the only things they buy, aside from digital downloads, are a few more clothes, snacks, drinks, and non-perishable sundries.”